Upon his return Mistress Roy was waiting for him.
"Did ye deliver them a'?" she asked, bending forward her head in a threatening manner as if expecting a negative reply.
"A' but yin!" said Cleg, who was in good spirits, and pleased with himself.
His mistress took up a brush. Cleg's hand dropped lightly upon a pound weight. He did not mean to play the abused little message-boy if he knew it.
"And what yin might that be?" said Mistress Roy.
"Mackimmon," said the boy briefly, "he's no in Rankeillor Street ava'."
The hand that held the brush went back in act to throw. Now this was, from the point of view of psychological dynamics, a mistake in tactics. A woman should never attempt to throw anything in controversy, least of all a brush. Her stronghold is to advance to the charge with all her natural weapons and vigour. But to throw a brush is to abdicate her providential advantages. And so Mistress Roy found.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that was the course described by the pound weight on which Cleg Kelly dropped his hand. It sped fair and level from his hand, flung low as he had many a time skimmed stones on Saint Margaret's Loch in the hollow under the Crags.
"Ouch!" suddenly said Mistress Roy, taken, as she herself said, "in the short of the wind." The hearth-brush with which she had been wont to correct her former message boys fell helplessly to the ground.
"Fetch me a toothfu' frae the back o' the door. Oh, ye villain, Cleg Kelly! I'm a' overcome like!" she said.